The reason I mention toe- in so much is because I had a lot of tire wear on the inside of my new sidecar tire.

I heard so much about drawing the lines on the floor and every thing I tried,I couldn't really get it right by myself. I finally figured out in order to have the straight lines I needed something long enough and straight. I ended up getting 8' metal studs and I then took all of my measure from the rear of the bike when your talking fractions of a inch, I really needed two people to finallize my measurements.

Tim I agree with you on the lean out, my car has has ECC (electric camber control) and I'm able to adjust my lean on the fly

In reading this thread I thougt maybe some of the stuff below may help a little. There are some exceptions to what I am going to write here but for all practicaal purposes and in most cases this may prevent much of the 'chasing your tail' delimas that can confront those setting up theur own sidecar when just getting into this ciscus. Food fore thought anyhow :-)
First off lets define lean out. Lean out is how far the bike leans away from the sidecar. Lean the bike left (away from bike) to go left and right to go right. So if it pulls to the right lean th ebike left or more out. Simple? Yeah sorta....but make sure that you know if your toe in is affected when you adjust your lean out.
For those who have some sort of manual or electric control to jack up or let down the sidecar suspension you are not actually changing the true lean out (static adjustment) you are TILTING the outfit left or right. This is not abad thing and it can be a great thing in many cases.
HOWEVER.....If you find that you are running with the adjustment up all the time .... then....it is probably best to adjust the static (true) lean out. The electric control should be thought of as a fine tuning device and not THE main source of acheiving a good tracking sidecar outfit.
If we could see and define that ther eis a differentce between lean out and what many of us call tilt it would probably make things a lot more clear to many.
Think of this.....when we lean a bike out we may keep the sidecar wheel vertical. When we tilt the whole outfit we are leaning the top of the sidecar wheel in some. This can cause unwanted tire wear on the sidecar tire. Usually not a life or death concern but it is there. There are other reasons for sidecar tire wear but we won't go into that now as it is usualy not a big concern.
Another item that should be taken into account regarding lean out OR tilt relates directly to the given outfit we are dealing with. We see things posted that say the sidecar should weigh around 1/3 of what the bike weighs. Not really bad advice at all but this is not cast in stone by any means. A heavier sidecar will be more stable in turns toward the sidecar but a lighter sidecar with a wider track width can still become quite stable. One concern with a light sidecar is that a lighter sidecar may have too soft of a suspension to handle all the weight transfer in left turns (turns away from sidecar). Mounts, spindle size etc can also be a concern with some smaller sidecars.
Toe in? Toe in for most outfits should nto be thought of as a means to get good tracking. Usually if toe in is between say 1/2 and 3/4" you will have a good starting point. Less toe in means less tire wear, usually on the rear of the bike. If on ehas a car tire on the rear of the bike and a small narrow sidecar tire the resulting tire wear due to excessive toe in can show up on the sidecar tire as it is 'overpowered' by the large rubber on the bike.
You can ride a rig with excessive toe in and it can handle and track like a dream. You may nbever notice anything bad until the cords start to show....not a good thing. Again.... it is important to know with any givcen outfit what changing the lean out does to toe in. This is all related to the lower mount placements and can vary from outfit to outfit.
Sidecar mounts need to make th esidecar and the bike into one rigid unit. Flex or movemtn when underway will blow the best setup right out the door.
Oh, note that Toe out will typically create a pull toward the sidecar and grind tires away quickly. Not a good thing at all.
Well hope this helps a little. trial and error is always a part to some degree in acheiving th ebest setup for any given outfit and operator. What is good or feels good to one may not to another. The basics presentled above are to hopefully get someoen to a good base point and from there they may be able to make things better and better. One change at as time is nopt a bad policy. Neither is recording what you did so you can get back to square one if needed.

Claude
I really appreciate your imput. My problem was when I first received my sidecar I messed around with the ECC and never returned it to the static position. I then connected the sidecar when I came back from my 3,000 mi. trip I noticed the scrubbing on the inside of my new sidecar tire, the bike tire looked great.

I then went back and readjusted everything and have the ECC in the static position most of the time now

Claude
I really appreciate your imput. My problem was when I first received my sidecar I messed around with the ECC and never returned it to the static position. I then connected the sidecar when I came back from my 3,000 mi. trip I noticed the scrubbing on the inside of my new sidecar tire, the bike tire looked great.

I then went back and readjusted everything and have the ECC in the static position most of the time now

You can set the ECC in what i suppose you mean by static position where ever you feel it will be the most usefull for what your situtaion may be prior to actually setting up the sidecar. In other words ... If you set the ECC so the sidecar suspension is close to being as low as it will go you have a lot of lee way to allow for heavy loads in the sidecar or high road crowns by jacking it up with the switch and so on. You would be able to add 'tilt' to the rig this way.Keep in mind that a softly sprung sidecar will sag when weight is added. This adds tilt away fromt he bike. When you jack it back up with the ECC you are simply getting it back to the happy point. If you set the ECC too high statically probably won't have enough adjustment left to go up.
We usualy set the ECC low and then setup the outfit's lean out as if it had no ECC. There are exceptions to this but they are not the norm so to speak.
A light sidecar with a soft suspension on a heavy bike is by far one of the harder combinations to find th ebest compromise on.
If you are new to sidecar operation is is important to practice withe the ECC in different positions with the wisecar loaded and unloaded. If you raise the sidecar to allow for the passsenger weight and then the passenger gets out you will find that right handers willbe a little more spooky due to the tilt added. Practice is very important here. Have fun but be safe. As seat time is added the outfit will talk to you and tell you what it wants....

Claude
What I considered the " static" position was all the way down at its lowest point. The motor will move the car up about 8"
I adjusted the shock up to the stiffest position because I at first thought that the amount of weight ( camping gear, passenger) was causing the tire wear. Even though pictures taken during the trip didn't show any sag between car and bike

But boy it sure is a learning process the rig is set up now, so that approx 220 pounds can be put into it without having to mess with the ECC that much. I found that out the other day taking a friend of mine for a ride, I had to lift the car up a little

I'm relatively new at owning a sidecar and read with earnest about the large sidecar groups that they have over in Europe, with groups of people riding out into the snowbanks and having great camp outs.

The latest fellow I've been watching is PetrB who lives in Russia and who appears to be having a great time running around in the frozen north

The area that I live in Alaska has had a long spell of no snow and whatever snow we have had was blown away by 65 to 70 mph winds The temperatures have been pretty low .

But this last week the wind stopped temperatures rose to about 28-30 I decided to take the bike out.

A picture of my son who is also a inmate in the regional forums, he also ride a 1200GS

Any way I wrote up a thread in the regional forums about winter riding

Monday of this week It really didn't look to promising 41 deg and raining

By Wednesday we received 8" of snow and the temperatures dropped to the low teens. So I decided to install a snow chain on my rear automotive tire which is a 165/80-R15.

A fellow inmate on this forum who scree name is Drone graciously offered to send the chain that he didn't need

There was a very informative film clip that showed exactly how to install the chain on the tire looked like it was a snap to do. The only problem for me was a wheel well has a lot more room to move around. The tire area of a 1200 GS is a tad closer

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There is some thing is hitting on the muffler can I can see this is going to be a work in progress

But I had great traction moving forward and stopping. The chains are a little askew when I started off but everything centered itself by the time I got back